Charlie Lyne wanted to solve
one of few remaining ‘ungoogleable’ mysteries.
He made a 14 minute documentary for the British Guardian News to
discover whether or not people had something ‘fishy’ in their family history.

Charlie got this idea from his
friend, Casper Salmon, whose grandmother once invited all the people to come
together at her place, if they lived on her Welsh island and had names related
to some sort of Fish. They would also be
given the type of fish of their last names.
Some of the people who showed up had names like Mr. Salmon, Mr. Whiting,
Mrs Crab, Mr. Mullet, Miss Bass, and many more; the Herrings, the Trouts, and
the Anchovies, etc. His grandmother got
the phone book out and called up all the people on the Island with “fishy” last
names.

Taking his grandmother’s cue,
Charlie decided to do a brief documentary to try and sort out the truth behind
this ‘fish story’. What he discovered
is that all these folks with fishy last names where to come together as part of
a large publicity stunt to advertise the grand opening for the Anglesey Sea Zoo
Aquarium, which was the only Aquarium in England dedicated just British species
fish. In a day before Internet, 24 hour
news, or Facebook, the “Fish Story” made
a big enough “splash” to get the word out.
And the Aquarium is still operational today. http://www.firstshowing.net/2017/watch-fish-story-short-film-discovers-the-truth-behind-a-fishy-tale/

Today, the question of Jesus
we are considering is also a “Fish Story” of sorts. It’s part of a story containing two very
important questions asked by the resurrected Jesus. Both of these stories form the epilogue to
the gospel of John. They bring the
beautifully written, very personal, intimate gospel to its conclusion, but are
much more than after thoughts. These two
stories contain the two important ‘mission’ and ‘ministry’ questions the church
of Jesus Christ could be asked to answer.
The first one, which we consider
today is: “Friend, haven’t you any
fish?”.

I’M GOING OUT TO FISH…

This ‘fish story’ starts with
the number one, biblical fisherman, Simon Peter. What is most unusual, or perhaps very usual,
depending upon your perspective is what Peter does after encountering Jesus
having been raised from the dead. He
goes fishing.

Now, if you’re fishermen, you probably
wouldn’t find this ‘strange’ at all.
Most fishermen will tell you that fishing is how they best handle stress
and/or relax. Perhaps this is what Peter
is doing. Perhaps he’s going fishing to
clear his mind and process all of the very ‘heavy’ happenings that have been
going on in Jerusalem the last three years.
Peter is going to the beach, that is ‘The Sea of Galilee,’ to take a
break from it all. Or maybe, we Peter is
going back work. After all, he was by
trade, a fisherman.

But can go back to life ‘as
usual’ after you have personally encountered the risen Christ? You do have to make a living, but how
different might life seem after you have had a life-changing and
life-challenging experience that still makes your legs weak, your head spin, or
your heart skip a beat? I can imagine
entertaining a once ‘dead man’ could be an experience just like that. You would need a few ‘vacation days’ away
just to ask and try to answer for yourself: “Just what does this mean?”

One of the major problems of
our times is that people take ‘vacations’ that are not actually vacations. They go away and return home even more tired
than when they left. That same Guardian
Newspaper who sponsored the ‘Fish Story’ ran an article a few years back,
entitled “The Exhaustion Epidemic”. It
says that today we generally have more money, better health, and better jobs,
but our lives are becoming more complicated and more stressed than ever before. We live at a ‘breakneck pace that seems to
never sleep.’ How long will our advances in health hold
out?

In his book The Third Wave, Alvin
Toffler wrote that human civilization has gone through three major cataclysmic
shifts – and he thinks we're currently in the change from an industrial culture
to a globalized one - and each wave we go through has been associated with some
kind of ill health. The stress and
exhaustion doctors see in patients now are similar to those known to middle-class
England at the beginning of the Industrialization in the 18th century. (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2006/dec/03/healthandwellbeing.features).

Besides seeing the beginnings
of declines in physical health, a society that is always in a hurry to do
everything, know everything and have everything, brings increased emotional
pain due to the loss of a spiritual life.
When we lose the ability to slow down, be quiet and reflect, and yes,
even worship, we soon see increased personal, relational, societal, and spiritual
problems too. Mark Taylor, writing in the “Chronicle of
Higher Education” quotes the Verizon commercial which says: “Welcome to a world
where speed is everything” or the Hitachi Computer add which says, “Speed is
God, and time is the devil.” In “real”
time, life speeds up until time itself seems to disappear---fast is never fast
enough, everything has to been done now, instantly….Speed is the measure of
success.” But what is always lost, as everything speeds
up is time itself; time for family, time for friends, time for children or time
with elderly parents, and yes, of course, time for God.

Ironically is was just a few
years ago, with the emergence of personal computers and other digital devices,
during the last 1960’s and 70’s, that many were predicting a new age, in which
people would be drawn together in a ‘global village” where they were be freed
from the burdens of work and would have ample leisure time to build community,
solve social problems, and pursue greater interests. In 1956, Richard Nixon predicted a 4-day work
week, and a decade later, a Senate subcommittee heard testimonies predicting
that by the years 2000, Americans would only be working about 14 hours a
week. (http://www.chronicle.com/article/Speed-Kills/149401).

What happened? Well, what happened is that we used all that
speed to go after more; more experiences, more knowledge, more entertainment,
and more stuff. And what did we
get? We got more boredom, less wisdom,
less fulfilment, and too much stuff with no room left for much of anything else
except what we want in the moment.
“Today’s young people are not merely distracted, the internet and video
games are actually re-wiring their brains,” Taylor writes. It won’t be long until we will have new
diseases, new disorders and new medicines, including much more Ritalen to try and slow down our
children’s brains so they can focus and think.
Did you see the news flash recently saying that an alarming number of
young men seemed to have stopped looking for work so they can give their full
attention to video games? I guess they
are all planning living off a nation that goes to war where they have skills to
win the game(http://nypost.com/2017/07/08/were-losing-a-whole-generation-of-young-men-to-video-games/).

The
world is not the only one who is filled with a lot of busyness that’s is not
always healthy. We in the church can
also get so busy doing the good we want to do, that we forget to do the good we
need to be doing. Might it be a good
thing, in our time, just like Peter does in the gospel story, to stop to focus
and figure things out. Peter makes by
taking time. He goes on a retreat---not
just to fish for the sake of fishing, but to fish for figuring out what life
means now and what he and the disciples of Jesus are supposed to do next. Peter has to figure things out, because after
meeting the risen Jesus, everything has changed.

THROW YOUR NET ON THE
RIGHT SIDE…

Perhaps the most important
learning Peter does on his ‘fishing trip’ is that he learns that by himself,
even with all his skills, he can fish all night and still catch ‘nothing.’ Peter is a very experienced fisherman, but what
he is learning here is not about fish, but about his own life’s mission and
purpose. And the mission that Jesus has
called him into is a mission that he will not be able to accomplish in his own
strength, or based on his skills alone.
The mission Jesus has called Peter and all the disciples to is a mission
to ‘fish for people’. This is a mission
that will be impossible, in their own strength. This is a mission they will have to pause and
learn to be the most important thing they will ever be called to do with their
lives.

“Friend, have you caught any fish?” This question would have never come
out now, without Peter’s own failure; both on the boat and in the city, where
Peter denied Jesus three times. Even his
failure was grooming Peter to answer the right question that pointed him back on
mission to follow the one who called him.

Perhaps today, in this busy,
hurried, distracted and world, with our fast paced lives, we too need to hear
Christ’s question to everything we are doing at church, and in our own personal
lives at Christ-followers: Have
we caught any fish? The call of
the gospel to ‘fish for people’ has not changed, will never change. In fact, the need for being an evangelistic
church on an evangelistic mission may be more important now, than it has ever
been before. And it is our own failure
to reach people, to catch people, to win people or even to influence people--even
though we may be trying just as hard as Peter was---might help us renew and
revitalize the most basic of all tasks the church has been called to do: Fish for People.

If we do take time to consider
what it might mean to be ‘fishers for people’, we also need to learn, like
Peter did, that there is a wrong side of
the boat to fish from and there is a right side. And the right side of the boat to fish from
is the side that Jesus determines, not the side or way we determine on our
own. This might be the most important
lesson Peter learned on his whole trip; not how to fish, but HOW NOT TO FISH---that
is, based only on his own efforts, his own habits, his own understanding, or
only with his own skills. What finally brought
Peter success was when became willing to listen to a voice that was not his
own.

Perhaps this is the greatest
lesson in evangelism for all time, then and now. I don’t think there is ever really an exact
‘right’ or ‘wrong’ method of fishing for people, as long as the method includes
actually listening to people and hearing their problems, their hurts, their
hungers, and their needs. The gospel can
never be reduced to something we say, until it is first something we see, hear
and feel. When we are fishing for
people, in ways that really catches people’s attention, the church must remain
open, willing, and flexible enough to hear, listen and obey the voice that
leads you to move out of your own ways, habits, comfort zones and established forms.

It is often said that insanity
is doing the same thing over and over, that isn’t working and expecting
different results. That may be one way
to describe, but insanity in evangelism, or fishing for people, is doing things
which seeing who is right in front of you and needs you to really listen. Recently I read of a newspaper reporter who
was doing a report about a Mental institution that had just opened in his
community. The director was telling the
reporter about the mental ‘test’ they gave to interview possible new
clients. This test would show how
mentally alert the candidate was or wasn’t.
The director explained how they would take candidate into a room, show
them a bath tub full of water and then give them the choice of a teaspoon, a
teacup, or a bucket to empty the tub full of water. “You
would use the bucket,” right? The
reporter answered. “Um, the director
said, “No, you should pull the plug on the drain. Exactly, which bed do you want, the one at
the window, or near the wall?”

That’s a funny story, but it
points to the church’s failure to see what’s right in front of us. It’s insane to speak the gospel, until we
listen to the need of the person we are talking to. What will work, in reaching people today, may
not yet be fully known to us, but it will certainly never be known if we don’t listen
and learn the voice of the stranger. We
learn in the end that the voice of the stranger is the risen Jesus. The gospel says that the voice of the needy
stranger, the least of these, is always Jesus.

Whose voice we listen to,
whether ours or theirs, determines which side of the boat we fish and how much
we catch. This is proved true over and
over again. Years ago, a young preacher
in California got my attention when he spoke of the typical person he wanted
his new church to reach in the community.
He got together with church leaders, wrote down all the needs,
characteristics, realities of the people outside the church (not needs of those
on the inside), and proceeded to plan their ministry based on the people they
wanted reach and be their church; not based on the people who were already in
the church. Several of the people on
the committee said that he shouldn’t do that.
They wanted the church to meet their own needs, first; not the needs of
the community needs. Those people ended
up leaving the church. When the majority
of the church made the decision to listen to the voice and needs of their
‘stranger’, “Saddleback Sam” and they proceeded to build the church around him
and her, the church grew into what today one of the largest churches in
American, called Saddleback Church.
Rick Warren is the pastor and attributes the growth of this church to
learning to listen to other voices besides their own.

Now, I’m not saying we need to
be like Saddleback, nor grow as large.
What I am saying is that this is the same kind of lesson Jesus was teaching
Simon Peter (and the church) on his fishing trip. If you really want to catch fish, the kind of
fish God has called us to catch, then you have to be willing to admit your
failure, change your tactics, and most of all, you have to listen to another
voice besides your own. When you listen
to their voice---the voice of lost sheep, the lost son—and the ‘least of these’,
then you are listening and hearing voice of the risen Christ. And when you listen to Christ as the stranger,
you are doing what the church was originally put here for. “The church is the only institution in this
world established for people who are not yet members.” If the church in still
not running rescue missions, it has ceased to be the church that Christ called
into being.

COME AND HAVE BREAKFAST

But catching fish is not the
end goal. Eating the fish is. That’s
why in the final scene we have the ‘stranger’ on the beach, cooking fish for
breakfast on a open, charcoal fire. The
smell must have been wonderful for a fisherman to smell; who was himself hungry
after hauling in such a big catch of 153 fish.
A lot of people have wondered what the number of ‘153’ represents. The best answer I’ve ever heard or read, is
that the 153 fish represents 153 fish.
It was such a large, big catch at one time, that should have, but didn’t
break the net that the disciples had to count each and every one.

We too, must remember, when we
answer the voice of Jesus to ‘go fishing’, that each and every person, or ‘fish’
we catch matters. Even though we want to
catch more fish; it’s always because of the fish who need to be caught; rather
than the bigness or smallness of the catch itself. Every person matters. Every need matters. Every way we share our faith matters. Every moment matters. Each way we try to fish counts and each fish
we meet counts. That’s why numbers
matters; not because of the numbers, but because of the people whom God loves;
and we must love and reach out to, because God love them and us to.

It is not accident that at the center of every church are two
pieces of furniture; the pulpit and the table.
The pulpit is where the truth is told; and the truth that matters most
is that Jesus wants everyone, people from every race, nation, tribe and even
religion, to be at the table. Make no
mistake the picture of Jesus cooking breakfast for the disciples is the example
for the disciples to be preparing the meal of love, grace, and mercy for the
world.

I verbally shared this at one church, but now I’m writing it down
and sharing it with both church. Back in
July, the Baptist State Paper, known at the Biblical Recorder, had a great
article written by its editor, Alan Blume.
After telling how the Southern Baptist Convention continues to grow in
the number of churches, he also shares statistics about how our churches
continue to decline in baptisms. We are
doing well at starting churches, he says, but we are not doing well at reaching
people. As he comes to the close of his
article, he suggests that part of our problem may be that, up to now, we’ve
done too much ‘judging’ sinners, instead of following Jesus’ example to be ‘a
friend of sinners’, as he was called, by those who did not approve. (https://brnow.org/Opinions/K-Allan-Blume/July-2017/Jesus-a-friend-of-sinners).

How do you and I become friends with sinners? Well, you certainly don’t expect the preacher
to catch them. “Church, you need to
start fishing from another side of the boat.” In a much more biblical way, you
could invite those unchurched, strangers ‘strangers’ to come to your house and share
a meal, Blum says. You could actually
try to become their friend around the dinner table.

Wow! Who would have ever
thought of something as simple as that?
Listen, really listen; not just to be, but to the voice, you will learn: “Jesus said to them,
"Come and have breakfast." Now none of the disciples dared to ask
him, "Who are you?" because they knew it was the Lord. (Jn.
21:12 NRS). When you make your table,
the table of the Lord and you share, it’s amazing how, when, and where Jesus shows
up. Amen.

Everybody
has an opinion when they answer questions like:
“What do you think the weather will be today?” “What do you think should
be done about North Korea?” “Do you
think religion makes sense in today’s world?”
“Should the government be in the health care business?”

This
spring and summer there has been a highly publicized court case in England to
decide the fate of the terminally ill infant named Charlie Gard. In April, the courts decided that little
“Charlie” had no chance of recovery and should be placed in palliative care. Charlie’s parents refused to settle for the
court’s decision. They mustered popular
opinion to raise money for experimental treatment, even gaining the attention
of the Pope and our America President. “The government should not decide the fate
of our child,” the parents said. Those
parents worked fearlessly to gain the attention of the world and to get popular
opinion on their side. They even caused
the British courts to take a second look at their own decision. (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/11/parents-fighting-to-keep-baby-charlie-gard-life-support-lose-high-court-battle).

In
matters like this, and many others, we all have our opinions. Sometimes our opinions agree with courts and
governments, but others times they don’t.
Our country, with its emphasis on democracy and freedom, invites popular
opinions and our government often makes decisions based on what people think. Other countries, like England, rely more
heavily upon expert opinions, but they are still opinions. Even the expert opinions can prove to be
wrong.

WHO DO PEOPLE SAY I AM?

When Jesus passed through Caesarea
Philippi,
a large Gentile town, far off the beaten path for most Jews, he asked his own
disciples about people’s opinion about him:
“Who do people say that I am?”

We
must understand that Jesus’ own ego was NOT driving this question. Jesus was not doing opinion polls. This was a ministry question, preparing his
disciples for their future mission into the world. This Gentile town, far away from “hot” Jewish
politics, was just the right spot. It
was a on the edge of the world beyond Jerusalem.

The answer the disciples gave reflects much
of the popular opinions surrounding the ministry of Jesus at that time: “Some say John the Baptist; others say
Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets" (Mk. 8:28 NIV). In the minds of the common people, these were
all great, good men. John the Baptizer
fearlessly spoke truth to power, so did Elijah and other prophets. Whoever Jesus is, popular opinion is saying
that he is in the same category as one of these great preaching prophets.

Today,
in our world still, opinions about are many.
Most every religion and most of the world would agree that Jesus was a
great prophet and teacher. Tons of
books are still being written about him.
Theologies are still constructed around him. Christianity is still the largest religion in
the world, at 2.2 Billion adherents. If you were doing a study of him, you might
suggest that Jesus was great, Jesus was good, and that many still claim that
Jesus was God; although Jesus never actually called himself any of these. In fact, when someone addressed Jesus as ‘good teacher’ his immediate response
was ‘Why do you call me good, there is
no one good but God’ (Mk 10:18).
Here, as shocking as it might seem, Jesus refuses to be called ‘good’ or
‘God’.

In
regard to greatness, Jesus himself said, “The
Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a
ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). This
statement came right after Jesus scolded his disciples who wanted greatness ‘like the Gentiles do’ (Mk 10: 42-44). In addition to the gospel story, the Greeks
and the Romans (and the Jews too for that matter) had long lists of
requirements for human ‘greatness’, but Jesus would not have made any of their
lists. In other words, Jesus was not a great military leader like Alexander the
Great, nor was he some kind of mythical Greek hero like Hercules, killing
monsters with his bare hands. And even
in the most conservative of terms, wrote John Ortberg, Jesus would not have
made any ‘most likely to succeed’
list, then or now.

Even
in the biblical record itself, we need to recognize that Jesus was executed as
a common criminal. Both professional and
popular opinions went against him in the end.
Whatever you or I think about him today, Jesus was not “good” or “great”
in any conventional way. And in regard to being “God,” in the gospels
at least, Jesus preferred to call himself “son of man,” meaning ‘human one’. Even after Peter confesses Jesus as “the Christ” or Messiah, Jesus warns
his disciples ‘not to tell no anyone
about him’ (v. 30).

WHO DO YOU SAY I AM?

Perhaps
Jesus wanted to keep his identity secret because he wanted to make it known on
his own terms. What we do know is that
because of the very low-profile Jesus took, the question about him remains a
living, open and very personal question, rather than a closed, dead or
impersonal answer. No one can answer this
question for you or for me. Each of us
has to answer for ourselves: “Who do YOU
say that I am?” It’s a question that
remains forever ‘close to our hearts’.

When
it comes to considering this about Jesus, not just from Jesus, we can’t
rely upon popular opinions or professional opinions. Mere opinion or easy answers can’t save
anyone. The apparent clumsiness and
ambiguities of the gospel records themselves do not allow easy, simple, or final
conclusions to ever be made. The gospels
neither give complete historical details about him, nor do they give us any
kind indisputable facts or deductions.
What the gospels do give us, is an invitation to faith, which is to answer
for ourselves who Jesus is. As Tom
Wright has rightly said, even the people who didn’t like Jesus, talked about
him. Others could not rest easy until
they did everything they could to get rid of him. Whatever you decide, Jesus is, as Wright
says, the ‘kind of person who demands our
attention’.

Many
years ago, the Oxford professor, C.S. Lewis, informed the English speaking
scholarly world how the question about Jesus ‘demanded’ his own attention. Lewis wrote: “[My aim] is to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing
people say about Him, such as “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral
teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the sort of thing that we must not
say. A man who was merely a man and said
the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic— on a level with
the man who says he is apoached egg— or else he would be the Devil of Hell.
You
must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a
madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit on
Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and
God” (From Mere Christianity, p. 55-56).

While
we can appreciate the astounding evangelical logic of C.S. Lewis, most people
don’t come to decide who Jesus is based on pure logic. Most folks either accept what their parents
taught them, or make decisions about Jesus during a time of great personal crisis. It’s not because they feel like they have a
choice to make, but because they feel they have no other choice to make, but to
make a very desperate, life-impacting decision about Jesus. Many
decide for Jesus like the Philippian Jailer, right after the earthquake broke
down bars and walls, freeing the prisoners he was responsible for and putting
his own life in jeopardy. In the book of
Acts we overhear him pleading with Paul and Silas, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved” (Acts 16:30)? The
need for someone to trust and find hope in, is not voluntary, but it’s mandatory
for saving one’s life.

This
is exactly how the now 91 year-old Jurgen Moltmann, described his own personal decision
to ‘believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and be saved’ (Acts 16:31). Even though Moltmann has been one of the most
highly respected theologians in the world today, he came to make his own
decision about Jesus based not upon logical argument, but based upon the most
personal terms of great anguish and quiet desperation. In the Preface of one of simplest books, Jesus Christ for Today’s World, he
wrote: “Who is Christ for me? I don't
want to evade this personal question through generalities, so I will begin with
a personal memory. In 1945 I was
imprisoned in a wretched prisoner-of-war war camp in Belgium. The German Reich had collapsed. German civilization had been destroyed through
Auschwitz. My home town Hamburg lay in ruins; and in my own self things looked
no different. I felt abandoned by God and human beings, and the hopes of my
youth died. I couldn't see any future ahead of me.

In this situation an American chaplain
put a Bible into my hands, and I began to read it. First of all the psalms of
lament in the Old Testament: “I have fallen dumb and have to eat up my
suffering within myself” (was Luther's forceful translation) '. . . I am a
stranger as all my fathers were' (Psalm 39). Then, after that, I was drawn to the story of
the passion of the cross, and when I came to Jesus' death cry I knew: this is
the one who understands you and is beside you when everyone else abandons you.
'My God, why have you forsaken me?' That was my cry for God too. I began to
understand the suffering, … God-forsaken Jesus, because I felt that he
understood me.

….I grasped that this Jesus is the
divine Brother in our distress. He
brings hope to the prisoners and the abandoned. He is the one who delivers us from the guilt
that weighs us down and robs us of every kind of future. And I became possessed
by a hope when in human terms there was little enough to hope for. I summoned up the courage to live, at a point
when one would perhaps willingly have put an end to it all.

This early companionship with Jesus, my
brother in suffering and the liberator from guilt, has never left me. Christ for me is the crucified Jesus. In the public and private conflicts of my life
I came to understand (His) presence. (From Jurgen
Moltmann. Jesus Christ for Today's World (Kindle Locations 37-48). Kindle
Edition).

When
I consider his personal testimony, I can’t help but recall the day Jesus became
‘personal’ for me. I was about nine years old in the third grade. We had just moved out of town into the
country, where I had to start attending a new school. We were still attending a small town church, and
on this particular spring Sunday, my Junior-grade, Sunday School teacher, Bud
Taylor, presented the gospel to me in the most personal way. As I recall, he basically said that he loved
us and Jesus loved us, and that he didn’t want us to ‘go to Hell’, so we needed
to receive Jesus as our personal savior.”

Since
everything else in my life was falling apart at that time, the last thing I
needed was to go to Hell. So, I prayed
to receive Jesus in Sunday School class that day. Mr. Taylor told those of us who made decisions
that we needed to tell our parents. I
was waiting on my Father when he came out of his own class and I told him. But instead of accepting everything at
face-value, my Father told me to go down the hall to Pastor Brackett’s office
and inform him. I didn’t want to do
that, but I still didn’t want to go to hell either, so I decided the pastor
couldn’t be that bad. Rev. Brackett went over the basics of gospel
to make sure I understood, and then told me I had to come up front, after the
service, during the invitation, and make it everything public. I didn’t want to do that either, but again I
figured that even standing in front of a church couldn’t be as bad as going to
hell, so I did. Later, I was baptized in
the cold spring waters of Snow Creek.
When I went under that 50 degree, almost mountain water, it took my
breath away so bad, that at least to a nine year old, it did feel like hell all
frozen over. But shortly after I caught
my breath again, I was O.K.

YOU ARE THE CHRIST…!

But,
as I look back now, it wasn’t the first decision that I made for Jesus as a
nine year old, or the cold water baptism that has made the biggest difference. It is been the many decisions I’ve made for Jesus
after that. It has been the life I’ve
lived ‘in Christ’, as the apostle
Paul named it. After Paul came to
believe in Jesus, he said he came to be ‘crucified
with Christ’, saying, I live, but I really
don’t live,‘but Christ lives in me. And the life I live now, I live by faith in
the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal. 2:20). Did you hear that: “The life I live now?” It is
the life we live for Jesus that makes our answer about Jesus more than just another
opinion.

Since
believing Jesus is living Jesus, what happened after Peter’s Great Confession is even more important
than Peter’s confession itself. After
Peter named Jesus ‘the Christ’ (Messiah),
Jesus began to give a whole different meaning to the word ‘Messiah’. To most people
then, including the disciples, Messiah
meant someone who would come to change the world. But to Jesus, the Messiah could not change
the world, but a suffering Messiah could call people to change within themselves. Peter objected
to this whole idea of suffering, holding on to his opinion, so Jesus rebuked
him in the strongest terms.

But
it is what comes after Jesus’ rebuke of Peter that still challenges us, even after
we have acknowledged Jesus as our own ‘personal’ savior. After silencing Peter, Jesus turned to the
crowds to make one of the most overlooked clarifications of what it means to
believe in Jesus: "Whoever wants to
be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me (Mk.
8:34-35 NIV). For Jesus, to be our savior,
he must be also become our lord in that we must make him ‘personal’ by taking
up (our) cross and following him.” Taking
up a ‘cross’ is a scary thought.
Recently, in a TV movie, I watched and listened as a Muslim woman was
being criticized by a Christian woman for wearing a Burka:“It makes you look like you’re either a terrorist or you’ve got
something to hide,” the Christian remarked.
The Muslim woman responded, “Well,
at least I don’t wear a symbol of human torture around my neck like you do.”(As Heard in the BBC series, The Tunnel,
First Season, 2016).

When
Jesus said we must ‘take up our cross’,
he said ‘OUR cross’, not ‘HIS cross’.
Taking up ‘our cross’ can
mean many things, including suffering or making sacrifices for the sake of
doing good. However we answer Jesus’
question: Who do you say that I am”, it
must mean that we put our ‘life’ into the confession of faith we have in him. We can’t save our life by saving it, or by ‘being
saved’, but we only save our life by entrusting ourselves to God, losing ourselves for the gospel as we put
our lives into it.

I
got a good idea what this meant when on the news, I watched a man drive a car
sideways on only two wheels, while a woman was doing a headstand off a chair balanced
on the car’s roof. When the news
reporter asked the man how long he could drive a car like that, he answered, “I
can drive for about 4 laps around the track, and then the tires wear out.” It was then that I became much more impressed
by the woman on the roof, than the man driving the car on two wheels. He was only driving a trick car, but she ‘put
her life into it’.

Now,
of course, that was a circus trick, but following Jesus is not about playing tricks
or playful antics. When Jesus asked, “Who do you say I Am”, he was not asking for a show, an opinion or
even a mere confession of your faith.
Jesus was asking the kind question
that will remain forever ‘close to the heart’. Your answer, my answer, and even confession or
profession of faith, means nothing and is only another opinion, unless we put
our lives into it. Amen.

My
mother was a seamstress. What that means
is that she sewed clothes for people. It
was something she learned from her mother, and when she retired from the cotton
mill, she decided to make her money sewing for women in the community. I especially loved it when she made
cheerleading uniforms for my high school and the cheerleaders had to come to my
home and try them on.

I
never learned a much about sewing, but I did come across a wise saying, which
comes from sewing and says: “Those who sew must first tie a knot.” Unless you want to re-stitch that button or
re-hem those pants often, you must first anchor it with a knot. Of
course, the wisdom here is more than just about sewing. The adage also relates to life. If you want your life to hold together,
without coming unraveled with ever crisis that comes, you’d better have a
‘knot’ or an ‘anchor’ that will help you keep your bearings as an unwavering
constant in your life (*This idea, and the flow of this message comes from Daniel Day's, If Jesus Isn’t the Answer…: He Sure Asks the Right Questions! (Kindle Location 831). Smyth & Helwys Publishing. Kindle Edition).

WHAT
IS WRITTEN IN THE LAW? (Luke 10:26)

For
most of us that ‘knot’ has been given to us from our parents, from church, from
school, or from other close relatives or other formative connections in our
lives. This is where we learned what was
right and wrong, sacred or taboo. This
is where we learned to trust what was real and to figure out what isn’t.

But
at some point in our lives, these certainties and confidence have been
shaken. To keep our analogy going, we
learn that other people ‘tie their knots’ very differently, or tie them ‘at
different places’. We come to realize
that people out there, beyond our own tribe or family, don’t understand life
the same way we have. This can cause us
to question the ‘authority’ of some of
our own upbringing and conceptions. We
wonder if we have been right to build our lives on the ‘knots’ or ‘anchors’ we
were given.

Several
years ago, the owner of a Concrete company in Boone, was looking after the
house that my family and I were living in while on furlough from our mission
work. One day, while we were trying to
get the furnace going, he was telling me about a young girl who was going off
to college. He said that her mother had
come to him with great concern about whether or not she would keep her faith
while away at college. He said, “I told
her that depends. If you allowed your
daughter to develop her own faith, and you didn’t force it on her, then you’ve
probably nothing to worry about. It’s
her faith. But if she only has your
faith, and not her own, then I’d be real worried too.”

That
was not a very professional way to approach it, but he got the point
across. Life and faith is not just about
passing down knowledge, but its also about making choices. Daily we have to make decisions about what
matters, what we should or shouldn’t do, what kind of faith we have, and whether
we will trust in anything at all. If we
want to have an anchor, or ‘tie a knot’ that holds together, then we must
decide which voice, which teaching, or even which viewpoint we will choose to
build our lives upon. Life means making a choice: You cannot, not choose.

When
we lived in Germany, our own cultural and even religious choices were sometimes
tested and tried. Once, my chair of
deacons in my German church recommend a campground for our family. We wanted to experience camping in Europe, so
we bought a tent and headed out. We
arrived late, quickly set up the tent and went to bed. Early the next morning, my daughter wanted to
go swimming. We were the first ones
there, but it wasn’t long until others came.
The arrived much like we did, but then everything changed. They all went swimming with no close on
whatsoever. My German Baptist friend had
no idea we didn’t also swim that way.

Now,
that was literally untying a really big knot for us. We didn’t go there again, and we never got
use to this European norm. What they
called natural, we called nudity.

My
point is that every culture, even Christian groups, have their own specific ways
of choosing which knot will be tied tightly and which one knot will be tied
loosely. Those German Baptists had some very specific knots they
tied tightly, which we didn’t. If you
didn’t attend church for a couple of Sundays, you could be thrown out
permanently. Also, if you didn’t bring
your hymnbook to church with your and you didn’t sing, or at least try to, then
your faith would be questioned. Music
was how the ‘redeemed of the Lord said so’.
The point I’m making is that even within the Christian faith, not just
in Germany, but in Brazil, or other countries, Christians make choices about what
is most important, and what is less important.

In
our text today, Jesus revealed that one tightly tied ‘knot’ that anchored his
own religious upbringing, and his people, was Scripture. Every faithful Jew believed that God had
given written texts to help guide the people in making good choices and giving
right shape to their ethical and religious life. Thus, questions like “What did Moses command”
(Mark 10:13), “What is written in the Law?” (Luke 10:26), or as in our text, “What then does this text mean?”
(Luke 20: 17), were very important questions for faithful people in Jesus’ day. The way people made right choices was well
established and clearly guided by God through sacred, written, texts.

That’s
how it was for them, but for us not so much, and it’s also much less
clear. As Dan Day has rightly said, “For
many people today its not so obvious, that Moses’ words or any ancient
religious text for that matter’, could have ‘anything applicable’ to say to
us. It is bizarre, even to some of us,
that what ‘was written on parchment by people living in tents, with no
electricity (an no internet) living 3,000 years ago, could have anything
relevant to say, let alone be authoritative.”

Of
course, Jesus, and many of us too, don't think Moses, or the Prophets, spoke
only for themselves, but we actually believe, that God was speaking through
them, and still can speak to us through these ancient words. Jesus believed this too, and this is why the
question, “What did Moses Command” was one of the most important than could
ever have been asked in his time. But
what about our time? What do these
ancient words from ancient texts really mean for us, and for our world? Is there anything here that really matters,
and why should we still care?

Recently,
I got the Fall schedule for the local Community College in the mail. I searched all through that paper, through
all the many planned classes. They had
classes on Gardening, Agriculture, Horticulture, and even Viticulture. They had classes on Law Enforcement, Nursing, Firemen training, and other forms of
community service. They also trained for
skills for working on Small Engines and other Mechanical fields; as well, as
pastimes, like painting, music, yoga, and many others. But no where in that magazine did they advertise
any kind of course in how to read, interpret, or understand the Bible. I know they must teach some introduction to
religion course, because a friend of mine teaches it, but it wasn’t important
enough to list, even in the middle of the buckle of the Bible Belt. Can you image how less important it is
elsewhere, if not here, where?

WHAT
DID MOSES COMMAND? (Mark 10:13)

When
in our text today, it tells us that “Jesus looked directly at them and asked,
“What then is the meaning of this text… or as others translate, ‘of that which
is written’, it implied that most
everyone in the culture, even without have access to a written copy of the
Scriptures, knew the text Jesus was referring to. Even though only a few had access to written
texts, they still knew. Scripture was at
the heart of their daily culture, their weekly worship and their intentional upbringing. In other words, when Jesus asked, “What Did
Moses Command?”or “What did this text mean?” It meant something.

But
what exactly this text, or any text from Moses, from the Prophets, or from
Psalms meant to people was never automatic, without some effort to understand. The people had to constantly hear Scripture
quoted and learn ways to interpret them.
The meaning in these ancient texts, even to them, had to be read,
discussed, and filtered through an their own interpretive filters for
processing. In other words, to answer
Jesus’ question, “What does this mean?” meant that you had to do your
homework. There was ‘gold’ to be mined,
but you still had to mine it.

When
you study how Jesus treated and interpreted Scripture, you can find a two-fold
approach. One, Jesus reverences
Scripture highly, memorized it, quotes it, and uses it as an final, anchoring
word, a bedrock. A clear example is when
Jesus quotes Scripture, and literally, ‘throws the book’ at the devil who is
tempting him while he is in the wilderness (Matt. 4). Jesus uses Scripture, as we should, to tie a
unbreakable knot, to anchor our lives against those forces that can tempt and
destroy us.

But
strangely enough, even with the high view of Scripture which Jesus had, there
are other times that Jesus appears to loosen the knot of Scripture,
disregarding certain laws, regulations, and rules which were clearly, concretely,
and most obviously written. An most
obvious one of these was how Jesus completely untied the knot about Kosher laws. In one single statement, Jesus wipes a page
from Bible, in one single statement. If
you recall, Leviticus 11 has all kinds of Kosher rules about what kinds of food
are to be considered clean, and which are to be considered unclean. Jesus show complete disregard for this entire
part Moses’ law, declaring, “It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a
person, but what comes out of the mouth defiles (Matt. 15:11).

In
the most important words Jesus ever spoke, a collection put together in what we
call ‘The Sermon on the Mount”, clearly states that ‘he did not come to abolish
Scripture, but to fulfill it’ (Matt 5:21), yet Jesus clearly offers his own
interpretation, which lessens some parts of Scripture, while expanding upon,
even going beyond other parts. Now,
before you think you can do this own your own, anyway you wish, you’d better
remember and realize that YOU ARE, OF COURSE, NOT JESUS. And as Jesus explained, he was not trying to
abolish or negate Scripture, but he interpreted Scripture in ways that helped
people build upon it, and even to ‘do greater works’, which led to ‘higher’ or
‘better’ ways of living, than were imagined in the Law.

When
we read Scripture, taking it seriously, but not always literally, we can also
see Paul, Peter, and the church following Jesus into areas of thinking, worshiping, and believing that were never given in Scripture, and going
against some things that had been clearly written. Just as Jesus challenged his followers to go
beyond Scripture’s ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and to ‘love their
enemies’, Peter was challenged by the
Spirit to go beyond Scripture to ‘kill and eat’ non Kosher foods, so he could welcome
a believing Gentile into the faith. Paul
also went beyond established procedures when he called himself an ‘apostle’ and
took the gospel straight into the Gentile world, ignoring strict rules about
circumcision, teaching that the priority of the Bible is grace, not law. Sabbath, Kosher, Circumcision, were knots
that had been tied tightly, but were eventually loosed, and some completely untied,
so that God’s love could be poured out to all.
We could go on, and on, but perhaps you get the point. Perhaps you are getting the point so well,
that you feel a little toward me, like they did toward Jesus, when he
reinterpreted things. But what you need
to know, is that even when Jesus reinterpreted the Bible, it was still being reverenced,
but constantly being reinterpreted, and fulfilled, as Jesus put it, so that
love, grace and mercy, dominated its primary theme, long before the first word
was ever printed on a printing press.

SEARCH
THE SCRIPTURES….THEY TESTIFY OF ME.
(John 5:39).

Sometimes
I still see a old Bumper sticker which says, “The Bible says it, I believe it,
and that settles it for me!” While I
can appreciate their enthusiasm for the Bible, what I learn from Jesus’
question put to these ‘teachers of the law’, is that God can still do new
things. As long as one sheep is still
lost, nothing is settled. As long as
hate is still the norm, love needs to provide the breakthrough, not what has
been said in the past.

If
we want to seriously anchor our lives in the Scriptures, in ways that makes
sense, saves us, our children, and our children’s children, while making real difference
in our world today, we are going to have to not only to quote Scripture, but we
also need to learn how to interpret it wisely, faithfully, but also lovingly,
and redemptively as well. Isn’t this
what Jesus meant when he scolded the Scribes and Pharisees, saying “Woe, to you hypocrites, for you pay your
tithe…but have omitted the weightier (most important) matters of the law,
judgement, mercy and faith; these ought to be done too, without neglecting
either” (Matt. 23:23). Isn’t this exactly
the most important issue Jesus’ question raises for us. How do we interpret and reinterpret
Scripture, without neglecting any part of what ‘ought to be done’, especially
since we are not Jesus, nor are we experts in the law?

Well,
we need to say that being an ‘expert’ in the law, didn’t help them, nor does in
guarantee any success at what matters most about Scripture. Of course, there are some very basic, good,
rules of Biblical interpretation that pastors, professors, and scholars learn
in school, but this in no way means we will ‘get it right’, by getting to ‘what
matters most’. Right interpretation of
Scripture means that we must consider needs, community, and wrestle with the
text like Jacob wrestled with the angel at Jabbok. Questions of right and wrong, and authority
can never be reduced to saying words or mere rehashing them, no matter how
‘holy’ they are or seem. Sometimes we
can take Scripture at ‘face value’, but other times we need ‘fresh
interpretations’. The hard work many refuse to do is to listen to the Spirit and
to others too, so that we can have the wisdom to know the difference.

The
need to do the hard work of ‘listening’ and ‘learning’ from God and others, is
why we can’t always take the Bible literally so we CAN take it seriously. Rachel Held Evans spent a year, as a woman,
taking the Bible literally, following all the rules, commands, and customs,
just as they were literally written. She
writes that this was one of the most difficult, painful, educational, and
thoughtful years she had ever lived. She
also discovered that taking the Bible literally was impossible to maintain in
real life. I’m just glad she didn’t have
a child that disobeyed her at the time, for she would have been instructed to
literally stone her child to death.

Also,
when you only take the Bible literally, but not seriously, you can make the
Bible say most anything you want it to say.
I know most people think of it in an opposite way. But when take it literally, but not
seriously, you can use the Bible to get away with murder, literally. This is exactly what King Henry the VIII
did, when he ‘tied the knot’ in the Bible for his own purposes. After his brother Arthur died, King Henry had
to get the pope to allow him to marry his dead brother’s wife, Catherine. When his marriage to Catherine still did not grant
him a male heir, Henry used the text from Leviticus 20:21, which said, “If a
man takes his brother’s wife in marriage, it is unclean, and they shall be
childless.” According to the Bible, so
reasoned King Henry’s literalistic logic, she was a curse on his kingdom, so she
had to go, that is die, like so many others.
Biology today tells us the whole problem was with Henry, not his wives.

Still
today, people do all kinds of ‘shenanigans’ with the text, to prove their
point, or argue the truth they want to hear or believe. What strict literalism has done is divide
Christians and split churches over fights that keep God on the sidelines of our
churches, and out of our lives. Could
there be another way? The good news is
that there is, and has always been a better way to find the meaning in a text
without battling over for for a book. John
tells us that in Jesus, “the Word became
flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” Or as Peter answered when many were leaving
Jesus in the dust, “To whom shall we go, for you have the words of eternal life.” Or
once more, as Jesus himself said, “You
search the Scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life: It is
they that testify about me (John 5:39).

Years
ago, when some Southern Baptists were having battles over the Bible, some
argued for a more literal, inerrant form of belief in the Bible, and others
argued for a more serious, sincere form of belief in the truth in the
Bible. For most of the church, and the
world, it was mere semantics---just arguments about words. But this discussion became more than words,
when one side gain political power and took “Jesus” out of it’s Confession of
Faith, which named Him as the ‘criterion’ by which the Bible is to be
interpreted’. For without Jesus, you can interpret the Bible any way you wish.

As
I saw it then, and still see it now, Jesus is the key to interpreting the
Bible, and the living Christ still leads us to discover that the greatest truth
of the Bible is about God’s love. Even
that great text where Jesus says, “I am the way, truth and the life, and no
one comes to the Father, except through me” (John 14:6), becomes a word to
love, rescue, and include people, not a word to hate, negate or exclude
people. Jesus is the truth, the way, and
life, and the only way to the Father because Jesus is God, and God is
love. And since God is love, God did not
come establish more religion, but to guide all religions to find true faith---as
James, said, ‘pure religion that is undefiled
is to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself
unspoiled from the world.” This way of love: love for neighbor and love for
God, is still the only right ‘way’ Scripture is to be interpreted. Amen.

Who likes to go to the doctor?Raise your hand. Just as I
thought, I didn’t think I’d get a very good show of hands.

Still, we all know, whether we like it or not, that good medical
care along with eating wisely and daily exercise, are all necessities for
maintaining good health. We know this,
but still it can be hard to do. Perhaps
you heard about the follow who was more than a little overweight. He told the doctor he was exercising daily,
but the doctor refused to believe it. So, the the
fellow listed all the the exercises he did every day: jump to conclusions,
climb the walls, drag my heels, push my luck, make mountains out of molehills,
bend over backward, run around in circles, put my foot in my mouth, go over the
edge, and beat around the bush (Readers Digest Online).

HE ASKED HIM…

A short time ago, I made a visit to the doctor myself. It was not a routine visit. I had an unexplained elevation in blood
pressure along with dizziness which caused me to feel like I was going to pass
out while pulling weeds from my garden.

So, when the nurse and physician came in, they started bombarding
me with all kinds of questions: “Why did
you come in?” “What symptoms did you
have?” “Are they still going on?” “Has this ever happened before?” “Did you eat anything different?” Questions, Questions! They were full of many questions. It made me remember what one of my
doctor-skeptical relatives once said, when the doctor asked him, “What’s going
on with you?” He answered very smartly,
“I don’t know, you tell me. That’s what I came to ask you.

For those who are a little smarter than my smarty-pants relative, we
all know that asking questions is an essential part of making a proper
diagnosis. Doctors are not gods, and
even more so, we rightly describe them as ‘practicing medicine’ because even
medical science is not an exact science.
Illness and good health depend on many different factors, and even
though there are some general rules to disease and wellness, every ‘case’ is
different because people and their bodies are different.

In the healing arts, and it is as much arts as it is science,
there is just no such thing as ‘one size’ or ‘one case’ exactly ‘fits
all’. This is why there are so many
warnings on medicine labels. It's also
why after you see or hear a new medicine being advertised on TV, right after you
hear about everything this new drug might do for you, they also have to warn
you what it might do to you. This is
also why you have to fill out so much personal and medical history when you
visit a new doctor. To help you, they
not only need to know about what’s wrong with you, they also need to have some
way of getting to know who you are.

What we know about Jesus, is that he was not only a “master
teacher”, but he also conducted a healing ministry and is called ‘a great
physician’. And like any other
physician, and even more so, Jesus most always approached the afflicted person
with questions---different questions.
When Jesus approached the mentally ill man, possessed with demons, his
first question was “What is Your Name?”
On another occasion, Jesus asked a blind man, after he removed his bandages and applied a ointment
of spittle and mud, “What do you see?” When
another Blind man cried out for Jesus to ‘stop and have mercy on him’, Jesus ironically asked, “What do you want me to
do for you?” Just like those doctors to
have to ask many questions in order to get a proper diagnosis, Jesus asked them
too.

Think again about that demon possessed man who was living in the
graveyard and continually cutting himself.
The very first question Jesus
asked him was: “What is Your Name?” How
many of us have entered the emergency room and had to answer too many questions
and fill out all those forms before a doctor would see us? It’s frustrating at times, but in most cases it’s
very necessary. It was also necessary
for Jesus to ask this mentally and spiritually confused person about his identity. How that man answered, “My name is Legion,
because we are many”, told Jesus and us as much about his spiritual condition,
as it did his physical one. Any good
doctor will remind you, that a good treatment that promotes healing always
starts with asking the right questions, and also not rushing to quick answers.

During my seminary training, I worked as a Chaplin in a major teaching
hospital. This short three months gave
me a much broader pastoral experience than I could have ever gained in
church-based ministry. Sometimes I even
got to rub shoulders with some very talented and busy physicians, some who were
glad I was working with their patients, others who didn’t care, and still
others who were willing to learn. In one
situation, I was called by a doctor who told me he had unanswered questions
about why one of his patients would not respond to normal medical
treatment. It should have been routine
to watch this man begin to get well from the medicines and therapy, but he
didn’t.

After reading the charts with nurses reports, the wise physician,
who knew nothing about spiritual matters, noticed that this fellow appeared
depressed without any clinical reason.
Remembering that he was trained to ask for chaplains, as a frontline
approach to signs of emotional or relational stress, he called me to ask if I’d
make a visit. I did, and I didn’t just
make one, but many visits and found this man to be depressed, not for physical
reasons, but for spiritual reasons, which we were able to talk and pray through
quite extensively. As several weeks went
by, the doctor noticed that his patient’s physical condition started to respond
to treatment and condition improved. One
day, when he saw me passing in the hallway, he stopped me and reported the
favorable result, even though he couldn’t explain why or how? His willingness to ask questions, beyond his
own knowledge was as important to the healing, as my own training was to learn
how to ask spiritual questions, without giving or suggesting easy answers.

PICK UP YOUR MAT AND WALK

This question Jesus asked in our text for today, “Do you want to
get well,” sounds very strange. But when
you consider the answer the paralyzed man gave him, it makes a lot more sense.

Jesus had just found this
man lying near a unique pool of water where all kinds of ‘disabled’ people were
always gathered around. Especially on
this special occasion, many crippled and
diseased people were seen waiting around the pool, until ‘the water is stirred’. The stirring waters, perhaps had very natural
causes, but were believed to have been moved by angels, or some other positive,
spiritual forces. For them, at least this was a therapeutic whirlpool with healing
properties.

What was most revealing about this crippled man’s response, was
exactly why Jesus asked him such a strange-sounding-question. The man, no doubt, had someone to bring him
to the pool called “Bethesda”where many other blind, lame, and paralyzed were
already gathered. But the man answers
Jesus’ question, not with an affirmative answer, but with an excuse. He answers that ‘when the water is stirred’
he has ‘no one to help him.’ This must
mean that he has no one to help him quickly get into the pool before the
movement stops. He can get to the pool,
but he couldn’t get into the water.

I
once had a aunt that I loved dearly. She
had never been married. My grandmother,
her mother died when I was two years old.
Her father, my grandfather, died when I was six. Because my aunt still lived on the farm, my
parents would visit every other Sunday during my childhood. One Sunday we would visit my still living
grandmother, my Father’s mother in North Iredell. The other Sunday, we would visit my aunt, my
mother’s older sister who lived a few miles west of Statesville.

I
loved how rustically, and independently my aunt lived. She didn’t have a bathroom. She didn’t have running water, except in the
kitchen. She also didn’t have central
heating; only a wood stove extending from the fireplace in the living
area. In the wintertime, I loved
fetching wood from the woodshed. I also
loved feeding the chickens and slopping the hogs, as well as pulling fresh
cherries from cherry trees, picking apples or pears in season. It was one of my favorite places to be.

I
loved it so much, that once, as a child, I decided I wanted to spend the night
with my aunt. I almost made, until she
started telling me how bad she felt, how her back or head was hurting her. I’m sure she made have had some real health
problems from time to time. But the real
issue was that she was lonely. She
liked to complain a lot. I noticed it,
even as a kid. When she started into a
‘fit of complaining’, as mom called, I couldn’t take it anymore and I had my
aunt call my parents to come and get me.

Again, I’m sure my aunt had some real health problems from time to
time, as we all do. But it seemed that
every time the doctors helped her, she quickly developed something else to
complain about. She even once ordered a
prayer cloth from healing evangelists Oral Roberts. When I suggested, with tongue in cheek to my
aunt that it must not worked, my mother stepped on my toe, which signaled me to
keep my big mouth shut. Did my aunt
really want to get well? It seemed to
me, that at least sometimes, she didn’t.
She really wanted to keep reminding us how lonely she was.

Perhaps the reason Jesus opened with the question: “Do you want to
get well” is because, for this fellow, as for us too at times, the sickness can
seem easier than the cure. Sometimes its
easier to give up. Sometimes the
treatment is overwhelming. Sometimes we
get so wrapped up in blaming somebody else, we forget how to take
responsibility for ourselves and our own actions. Coach John Wooden used to tell his UCLA
basketball players, on their way to become men, not just athletes: “Nobody is
really defeated until they start blaming somebody else.” So, he said,
“Try to fix the problem, don’t lay the blame.” Losers can blame, winners never do. I can’t ever remember a winning team saying,
“Well, it’s their fault that we won!”

This man is not helping his situation by laying blame, but as the
story unfolds, I love how Jesus didn’t say a single thing negative to this man
up front. What he does offer him is healing
without any up-front requirements at all.
Without another word, Jesus turns to him and commands: “Get Up!
Pick up your mat and walk!” This
is one of the stronger, double commands, Jesus ever gives, and he gives it to a
crippled man. It is not a command to
insult him, but it is a command to challenge the limits that has gotten into his
mind and heart, as well as, to challenge his physical situation. In directly, Jesus is saying: Stop blaming
anyone and ‘get up’ and you can walk!

One of my smart school mates, Robert Setzer Jr., comments in his
own sermon on this text, that ‘the measure of Jesus’ greatness is that sometimes
(I’d say often), he bets on a loser.’ He
continues, (I’m paraphrasing) that many of us, he and me included, would still
be lying beside our own pools of desperation, paralyzed with blame, fear or self-defeat,
drained of all our spiritual strength and emotional resources, had not Jesus’
love and challenging words of grace not come to us. Many you’ve been there, like I have and most
have, when unexpected sickness comes, with depressing diagnosis comes, when you
lost your job, when you lost a loved one, or when others let you down. It’s easy to get lock into to laying
blame---even blaming yourself. But Jesus
will not let you lay there for long. He
says to me, like he said to this cripple, and he says to any of us when life
cripples leaves us paralyzed with hurt: “Get Up!” Stop blaming them! Stop blaming yourself! Stop blaming me! Just get up and you will be on the way to
healing and hope. (Based on Encounters with the Living Christ, Robert B. Setzer
Jr., Judson Press, 1999, pp 58-59).

If you are the one lying around, blaming yourself or others for
your problems and your pains, would you let Jesus challenge you today? Would you let him challenge you with a friend
to walk beside you, with a church family who not only talked about grace, but
makes it happen. Would you let Jesus
challenge you with a word from Scripture that could leap off the page and find
a lodging place in your heart? Would
you hold your head up just long enough to look into his eyes or reach out, and
feel the touch of grace in his hand?

An old legend tells of hiker who lost his way and fell into some
quicksand. Confucius found the man in
this predicament and offered him a word of wisdom: “If I were you I’d stay away
from places like this? Buddha also saw
his plight and said, “Let the plight of this one be a lesson that you should
not repeat such folly!” Mohammad came by
speaking with great resolve: “Alas, this must be the will of Allah for an
infidel.” But then, finally Jesus came
up to the man, reach down his hand, saying “Brother, take me by the hand and I
will pull you out.”

Isn’t this the gospel?
Isn’t this the good news of Jesus Christ, that not only does not leave
us in our dying or hurting place, but offers us a way to live and to heal. And this is we know we need a savior, and we
know that we can’t save ourselves, when life has fallen in around us, and
there’s no one left to blame, and in no way will Jesus leave us there, but
offers us a way, when there is no way, and someone, when there is no one.

Just like Jesus skipped the big party in Jerusalem and went around
to the places of hurt and pain to find someone to save, Jesus can find us too,
no matter where we are lying, and no matter how all alone we might feel.

STOP SINNING OR SOMETHING
WORSE…

Still, just like the ‘stirring waters’ can’t really heal except
perhaps psychologically, or as auto-suggestion, the grace of God in Jesus
Christ is no magic nor miracle cure either, unless it has our own active
participation. This is why Jesus later locates the once crippled man in the
temple and reminds him: You’d better ‘stop sinning or something worse may
happen to you” (v.14).

Does it sound like ‘your Jesus’ or ‘my Jesus’ or ‘the real Jesus’ to
show up at church, after you and I have been saved, healed, or made whole, and then
to find us, look us straight in the eyes and directly say in no uncertain terms:
“You’d better stop sinning, or something worse, worse than even being paralyzed
or being lost, might happen to you.” Do
you think Jesus is threatening this fellow?
Do you think Jesus would be threatening us? Or could this be a sober, realistic, friendly
reminder that, as Bonhoeffer once said, “Grace is free, but it’s not cheap!”

Do you see why Jesus said this to the man. Ever since he was healed, he still hasn’t
gotten out of the old pattern of placing blame.
When religious leaders started asking him why he is carrying his mat on
the Sabbath, instead of describing how he was healed, he blames ‘the man who
made him well’ for commanding him ‘to take up his mat and to walk’ (v.11). But when question further, he did not know
who ‘this man’ was because Jesus had quickly ‘slipped away into the
crowd’. But when the man came into the
temple, perhaps to give thanks, Jesus sees him, and challenges him ‘to stop
sinning’ or ‘something worse could happen’. Right after than, falling into his
habit again, the man went to the religious leaders who wanted to kill Jesus and
squealed on him saying, ‘it was Jesus who made him well’ (v.15).

What happened to his man after this? We can only assume, as my school mate Bob
Setzer writes, “This is one man whom even Jesus couldn’t cure.” Yes, you heard right. Like the Rich Young Ruler who went away
sorrowful. Like the Rich man in Jesus’
parable who went to the Hell of unending torment. And even like Judas, whom John later will say
‘was a devil’ for betraying Jesus, and died only to ‘go to his own place’, here
is one of the few people Jesus healed, but didn’t cure. Perhaps it was the same for those nine
lepers, who didn’t return to thank Jesus too.
We don’t know. But what we do
know is that Jesus not only didn’t cure everybody, he couldn’t cure everybody,
because some did not want to be cured.
They wanted to stay the way they were, or to go back to the same old
unhealthy patterns and irresistible habits.
The wanted their own way, or it was the highway, as we say. What they didn’t get, was the endurance of
the saints, who are those will are not only saved by grace, but have been changed
and transformed by that grace, and will be saved, because they will endure to
the end.

So, hearing Jesus’ warning of grace, can you really understand his question? Do you really want to get well? Or is this just the same, o same o?

I conclude with a story, I also owe to Dr. Setzer, about a great
surgeon, who was about to perform plastic surgeon on a young boy who had lost
his arm in an accident. When the
surgeon came in to question the young man, he looked at him, and asked, “Now,
would you tell me about your handicap?” The young fellow look the famous doctor
with a look of surprise, and then with fire in his eyes answered, “Sir, I don’t
have a handicap. I just don’t have a
right hand.”

Now, that’s the kind of healing that is more than skin deep. It points us straight to the deeper,
spiritual, and more personal kind of healing, that Jesus came to give. Do you want this kind of healing? Do you really want to get well? You can, but you must ‘get up’ and ‘you must
walk’ it, and not just ‘talk it’. Amen.

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About Me

With over 30 years of pastoral experience, I've been the pastor of churches in both North Carolina and Germany, where my wife and I served as Missionaries in the 1990's. I'm currently serving as the pastor of two small, rural churches in western Yadkin and northern Iredell counties. I'll be celebrating 30 years of marriage to Teresa in 2010 and we have one married daughter.